Why do companies marketing to educators and students love to name their products campus edition? I suppose that the name is intended to make us see that they are creating something specifically for us. However, what exactly are they creating? The term does not seem to refer to the same set of things each time.
Most of my colleagues are familiar with the WebCT Campus Edition and Blackboard Campus Edition learning management systems. These LMS versions are being steadily morphed into Blackboard 9. At some point there will be no online Blackboard campus using the term campus edition. However, based on how frequently the term is used, I do not think there will be any shortage of products or services that do use the term.
An example is Mozilla Firefox Campus Edition 2.0.0.6, a student-centered variant of the Firefox browser that added two components, an iTunes control called FoxyTunes and a research manager called Zotero.
Wimba’s Campus Edition product is called Genuine Genie. It is designed to allow presumably a teacher or college professor to convert easily Microsoft Word documents into web pages. Added features will also allow interactivity to be built into the web pages. The web pages can be loaded into LMS courses. This product is a somewhat schizophrenic and has several permutations of its name/brand: Genuine Genie, Course Genie 2.0, and a version contained in Lectora (another name of prevalence).
One of the latest campus editions to hit the streets is by PBworks, formerly PBwiki. The shift from wiki to works signals that PBworks is expanding its business model. Unlike its basic free account PBworks Campus Edition provides unlimited premium workspaces for $799/year. The premium version offers centralized control, centralized account creation, centralized monitoring of accounts, branding of the PBworks accounts, and easy site administration. A planned add-on will be plagiarism tools. In effect, PBworks is nudging more into the realm of the LMS.
Whether or not PBworks is successful remains to be seen. In the present economy, the low cost is certainly in their favor. If past trends continue, one sure thing is that Campus Edition will not be the final name of their product and they will not be the last to call their product campus edition.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Is Voice Better than Text?
I recently read about Nuance Communication’s Dragon Dictation app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Nuance has created this app version of its remarkable Dragon Naturally Speaking software which allows you to speak into a microphone while Dragon types the text for you. Distance learning professionals have loved Dragon Naturally Speaking and comparable software for years. Many distance learning professionals will also gravitate toward to Dragon Dictation app which adds greater mobility to their ability to work at a distance. (This app is currently free in the US and Canada but if it becomes popular the cost will undoubtedly rise.)
Other Voice to Text Technologies
Of course, Dragon Naturally Speaking has not been the only technology to transcribe voice to text. Microsoft has long built this capability into its operating systems. However, it has not been something that they have marketed as value added, perhaps because it has been woefully inferior to Dragon until recently. Although Dragon Naturally speaking is still in my opinion the best, Microsoft has recently put some pretty good speech recognition software in Windows 7. It starts up easily and works a million times better than their previous versions although Dragon is still better.
Problems
With the app and speech recognition, professionals have gained powerful new tools to help them conduct distance learning courses which are largely text-based. However, does the use of the tools translate into better courses or better service to the students? From my own experiences the answer seems mixed.
One problem is over-reliance on the software. Dragon boasts that it is 99% accurate—and it is amazingly accurate—but there are drawbacks. Dragon learns to recognize your individual speech patterns as you use it and that takes time for the accuracy to get really good. Even so it makes mistakes and herein is a significant difficulty. You need to proof-read your own text from Dragon which is tough for lengthy passages where Dragon got 99% of it right but there are hidden sections that Dragon bobbled but with real words.
Years ago when I first installed Dragon I felt liberated from my slow typing speed. Now I could “type” at the speed of thought. For my online students this meant that I could answer their questions with more detailed, more nuanced answers. In actuality, many of my answers because less succinct. The reading involved in an online class already takes a good deal of time. Long instructor passages take even more time. Lengthy answers from instructors can confuse those who are not strong readers.
It has been my experience and I have heard from others that there is a fair amount of mental processing while typing with the keyboard. For most people, speech may happen to rapidly for this to occur. Speech is also perceived as relatively informal, a fact which we easily tolerate when speaking to someone, but becomes written speech significantly increases the expectation that there will be a more formal structure to the content and that more thought will be embodied in the construction of the content.
Why transcribe at all?
Sometimes I wonder why we bother transcribing at all. Would it not be better if we are speaking anyway to simply record the lecture and post the audio? This would help to students who may have some kinds of learning disabilities. This could help students who have differences in learning styles. This would enable students to listen to the content while mobile such as on an iPod or other mp3 device, which fits with the busy way our world works now.
Some of my colleagues argue that making the text available to students is important still to promote textual literacy, that it is still important for students to master written communication. Yet the same colleagues do not know what to make of the current texting phenomenon, which has students producing more text-based communications than ever.
Perhaps programs like Dragon and the new Dragon app could make a huge impact if adopted for texting. In fact, it could help us solve some of the issues we are fighting in education such as sentences in all lower-case with no punctuation and myriad acronyms. Teens, and all of us, could type as fast as the thoughts occur. This would remove the need for large QWERTY keyboards on phones. The question is would it be adopted because again we do not understand why texting is so popular. When we do we will be able to address the educational problems and move more decisively toward changes in the way students learn and the way we provide them information online.
Other Voice to Text Technologies
Of course, Dragon Naturally Speaking has not been the only technology to transcribe voice to text. Microsoft has long built this capability into its operating systems. However, it has not been something that they have marketed as value added, perhaps because it has been woefully inferior to Dragon until recently. Although Dragon Naturally speaking is still in my opinion the best, Microsoft has recently put some pretty good speech recognition software in Windows 7. It starts up easily and works a million times better than their previous versions although Dragon is still better.
Problems
With the app and speech recognition, professionals have gained powerful new tools to help them conduct distance learning courses which are largely text-based. However, does the use of the tools translate into better courses or better service to the students? From my own experiences the answer seems mixed.
One problem is over-reliance on the software. Dragon boasts that it is 99% accurate—and it is amazingly accurate—but there are drawbacks. Dragon learns to recognize your individual speech patterns as you use it and that takes time for the accuracy to get really good. Even so it makes mistakes and herein is a significant difficulty. You need to proof-read your own text from Dragon which is tough for lengthy passages where Dragon got 99% of it right but there are hidden sections that Dragon bobbled but with real words.
Years ago when I first installed Dragon I felt liberated from my slow typing speed. Now I could “type” at the speed of thought. For my online students this meant that I could answer their questions with more detailed, more nuanced answers. In actuality, many of my answers because less succinct. The reading involved in an online class already takes a good deal of time. Long instructor passages take even more time. Lengthy answers from instructors can confuse those who are not strong readers.
It has been my experience and I have heard from others that there is a fair amount of mental processing while typing with the keyboard. For most people, speech may happen to rapidly for this to occur. Speech is also perceived as relatively informal, a fact which we easily tolerate when speaking to someone, but becomes written speech significantly increases the expectation that there will be a more formal structure to the content and that more thought will be embodied in the construction of the content.
Why transcribe at all?
Sometimes I wonder why we bother transcribing at all. Would it not be better if we are speaking anyway to simply record the lecture and post the audio? This would help to students who may have some kinds of learning disabilities. This could help students who have differences in learning styles. This would enable students to listen to the content while mobile such as on an iPod or other mp3 device, which fits with the busy way our world works now.
Some of my colleagues argue that making the text available to students is important still to promote textual literacy, that it is still important for students to master written communication. Yet the same colleagues do not know what to make of the current texting phenomenon, which has students producing more text-based communications than ever.
Perhaps programs like Dragon and the new Dragon app could make a huge impact if adopted for texting. In fact, it could help us solve some of the issues we are fighting in education such as sentences in all lower-case with no punctuation and myriad acronyms. Teens, and all of us, could type as fast as the thoughts occur. This would remove the need for large QWERTY keyboards on phones. The question is would it be adopted because again we do not understand why texting is so popular. When we do we will be able to address the educational problems and move more decisively toward changes in the way students learn and the way we provide them information online.
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